Atlassian University Series - Trello Fundamentals
Welcome to part 3 in the University series! This time, I tackled the Trello Fundamentals Learning Path
You can find the other articles here:
This was an interesting one! I had no previous experience with Trello and I was lost as to why you should use Trello over Jira. Atlassian describes both products as advanced digital to-do lists that allow you to plan and keep track of your projects.
Before I go into more detail on what I have learned, let’s start with a rundown of the course itself.
Course
As this is a fundamentals course, Atlassian starts of with explaining what Trello is and how companies might use the product. They do this through a few use-cases which give some inspiration.
Trello consists of three basic building blocks; Boards, Lists and Cards. Every other functionality is connected to one or more of these blocks. Boards group all the information about a team or a project, lists are part of boards and organize the information. Cards in their turn, are a part of lists and are the smallest unit, representing tasks and ideas.
The course than goes on to explain the different blocks, how to set things up and how you can use the product with teammates.
The biggest take-aways here are
- Use templates to get started quickly. There are tons of templates available and both Atlassian and the community are adding new templates regularly. Explore all the templates here: Trello Templates
- Automations are available for repetitive tasks or to help with conditional transitions. They can also help to adopt Trello faster by eliminating some manual tasks that may seem daunting to new users. For example, you can assign a card to someone when they drag the card into a list, instead of needing that user to open the card and assign it to themselves.
You can create automations with the build-in tool Butler. Things can get as complex as you want. More information on how to use the tool can be found here: Creating and Managing Butler Commands - Power-ups allow you to connect Trello to external programs, provide additional functionality like reporting or tracking and a host of other neat things. They are developed by Atlassian and external companies and range from adding a simple Done or Delete button to a full fledge CRM system. Explore all the power-ups here: All Trello Power-Ups
Trello is also very customizable in terms of looks. You can change the background, colors and labels. Of course, you can also manage who can access the boards, ranging from private to the public internet and everything in between.
At the end of the course, Atlassian recommends a few best practices to help you on your way. Quite a few of them look very familiar.
- Use Trello daily and make it part of your routine. Check and update cards often, keep Trello open at all times, start your workday with a quick Trello check, commit to a 30-day Trello streak and customize Trello to make it fit your way of work.
- Use keyboard shortcuts. This was quite a useful tip and can making working in Trello a lot quicker. There are a lot of shortcuts available and you can find them all here: Trello Shortcuts
- Become a watcher to stay up-to-date. You can watch boards, lists and cards. This ties in with using it daily to keep informed.
- Sort lists as you want to see the most relevant information at the top of the list.
The free version gives enough options to get you started but you might want to consider upgrading to standard or premium if you want some additional options. The benefits, and the pricing, can be found here: Trello Pricing
Conclusion
All in all, the course flowed nicely. It started with giving a basic rundown of the product, gave some examples and explained different terms to help you get started. It is, however, what it says on the box, a fundamentals course. You won’t learn all the nitty gritty details but you will learn enough to get started.
As I said before, practice what you read. Sign up for a free Atlassian account and give the different products a spin. It will help you understand what is being said and will prepare you better for the Assessment.
Having an environment will also help with the changes that are occurring in the product. The course has static information which isn’t always up-to-date. I encountered several changes when following the steps in the course. The location of certain items was changed or a menu structure that was different from what was shown. None of them were changed so drastically that I couldn’t figure out where to go.
Results
I finished the assessment with a 96% score. I got confused with 1 question and make a small error. Most of the questions can be found directly in the course and you should be able to pass the assessment without exploring the product yourself. For a higher score, you do need to try some things out though.
Learning points
Did this course help me understand the position of Trello? Yes and no. It did gave me insight into how you can use Trello to help you organize projects and information. The possibility to automate tasks and to extend Trello with power-ups is very useful. I see how Trello can help individuals and small companies to order their lives and projects.
Trello is cheaper than Jira, is easy to use and has a low entry barrier. They also have a great mobile app, making it easy to use Trello when on route. This really helps with the day-to-day usage of the product and something that Jira is lacking.
I learned that the products are similar in a lot of ways, but target a completely different audience. Where I first thought that Trello had no place in the Atlassian landscape, I can now see the benefits of having this product available.
Will I personally use Trello after this course? I will most certainly give it a go in my personal life. There are some projects that I currently managing in other programs and I move those over to Trello to see how that goes. I must say that the automations have won me over in that department.
So in the end, this was time well spend! I learned a lot and it gave me insight into the product and it’s place within the Atlassian universe. I can highly recommend going through this course and find out for yourself!
Thanks for reading and please let me know how you are finding this course.
Kind regards,
Paul
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Paul Wiggers
About this author
Team Lead Service Desk
OutSmart International B.V.
The Netherlands
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